Professor Chris Jenks
Professor Chris Jenks is Brunel University's Vice-Chancellor and Principal.
Professor Jenks' intellectual background is in sociology and philosophy, though as a postgraduate (having taken a PGCE) he opted for the political challenges presented by the former.
His first major intellectual preoccupation was with the issue of equality of opportunity and he was therefore privileged to be supervised by Professor Basil Bernstein at the University of London Institute of Education who had forged the influential theory relating the social structure with the symbolic order, language and educational performance.
The two remained close friends until his mentor's death. Having moved into academic life as a specialist in the sociology of education his ideas developed widely, and he became primarily a theoretician. He was part of the movement in the 1970s to bring phenomenology and linguistic philosophy to the forefront in the analysis of social phenomena, which has now morphed into social constructionism.
Chris's wandering muse then began to address the issue of childhood, an analytic area then possessed by developmental psychology and largely ignored by other disciplines within the social sciences. For over a decade now he has been editor of the successful international journal Childhood.
His major publication in this area in 1982, The Sociology of Childhood, proved formative and he has gone on to be regarded as a major figure in this field, though he admits to running out of enthusiasm for the topic after nearly 25 years. During the 1990s he went on to make a major contribution to the sociology of culture, developing further into visual culture and urban culture.
More recently he has completed projects on extremes of human behaviour and is currently dabbling with complexity theory in the social sciences. His last ESRC grant was for £150,000 to investigate children's perceptions of time.
He is an elected member of the Academy of Social Sciences. In 2005 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and he has been appointed a member of the sub-panel in Sociology for the 2008 RAE.
His list of publications is quite exhaustive, the books include: Rationality, Education and the Social Organisation of Knowledge (1976); Worlds Apart: Readings for a Sociology of Education [with Beck, Keddie & Young] (1977); Towards a Sociology of Education [with Beck, Keddie & Young] (1977); The Sociology of Childhood (1982); Culture (1993); Cultural Reproduction (1993); Visual Culture (1995); Childhood (1996); Theorising Childhood [with James & Prout] (1998); Core Sociological Dichotomies (1998); Images of Community: Durkheim, Social Systems and the Sociology of Art [with Smith] (2000); Aspects of Urban Culture (2001); Culture; Critical Concepts (4 vols) (2002); Transgression (2003); Urban Culture (4 vols) (2004); Subculture: the Fragmentation of the Social (2004); with Qualitative Complexity [with Smith] and Childhood: Critical Concepts (4 vols) both forthcoming.
He has published numerous articles and chapters in books with topics as diverse as the Jamie Bulger murder and the Kray twins. Three of his books have gone into second editions and several have been reprinted between one and five times. His work has also been translated into Chinese, Korean, Italian, Croatian, Danish, German, Portuguese (and, he says, some think it ought to be translated into straightforward English).
Although he remains clearly committed to research and publication, he has a career in university management stretching back over 12 years. His previous department managed a 2 in the very first RAE and was dragged up to a 3a in the second. With Chris as Head of Department it moved from a 3a to a 5 and subsequently achieved a 5* that became a 6* due to their 100% staff entry.
As Pro-Warden for Research at Goldsmiths he saw the institution through the 2001 RAE with a 97% staff entry, 50% being returned at 5 and above and 87% at 4 and above. He believes in good university management and he is convinced of the ever-present potential for change and improvement.
Chris came to Brunel in August 2004 as Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) and Professor of Sociology. Brunel, he says, is a good place to work, there is an enormous amount of good things going on here and the institution has a great future. He wants to be part of that future.
Given the different subject and research profiles of the two institutions the culture shock was quite considerable, but he now feels integrated, recognised and pleased to be part of Brunel's future, to which he is committing a great deal of effort and care.
For about 30 years Chris was an active rock-climber and mountaineer. Now he says he gets his exercise walking to and from meetings and he gets his adrenaline rush from keeping up with government and funding council policy.
